Here’s a sadly ironic headline – Educating Our Children: The Evolution of Home Schooling. It’s my opinion that home schooling exists predominantly so that religious people can shield their children from anything which might threaten their machinations to religiously indoctrinate their children (worth a read – The 3 “I”s). Keep them ignorant of everything but religion, and they’ll be just fine. That’s the sad part, the ironic part is that perhaps the number one thing NOT on the home schooling agenda is teaching evolution, accept for all the bullshit which these people believe is evidence against it. Some of you are going to say that not all home schooling is like that, but let’s look at the opening quote from a mother home schooling her kids:

“We can teach our religious values to our children freely,” says Gebhardt. “We can teach anything that we want.”

“Anything that we want” she said. Yes, that’s what education is all about, teaching kids anything you want.

Another amazing thing about this article is the only worry it finds worth considering is the potential lack of social or coping skills the children will have. That’s the least of their worries. They’re going to be ignorant little shits, like their parents, who’ll no doubt go on to create more ignorant little shits, home schooling them, and so on, and so on. Look, I understand that there are some crappy, underfunded public schools in this country and in such cases home schooling may be an unfortunate necessity, but the religious are taking advantage of this to fill their children’s heads with anything they want. They’re using an accepted alternative for childhood education to effectively block them from getting an education.

“The parent, because she knows the kids, she knows how they learn,” Meghan Gebhardt said. “She can shape the way she teaches so they can learn better.”

That’s complete bullshit. I don’t care how well you know, or think you know your kids, you don’t know how to diagnose learning disabilities or how to treat them. You don’t know how to recognize things like dyslexia or vision disorders. There are a host of things the average person simply is not trained in which teachers and other staff in public education are. Knowing the personal quirks of your precious little snowflake simply isn’t enough to make you qualified to satisfactorily educate them. Teaching children must be the toughest task of all. I teach, for all intents and purposes, adults. Furthermore, I teach those who want to learn what I’m teaching. I would never presume to think I could teach EVERYTHING, teach it to those who have little to no interest in what I’m teaching, or do so with children. It’s an incredible arrogance to presume as much, and I’ll say incredibly selfish as well, placing one’s ego before the best interests of their children. But of course, the religious believe keeping their children isolated and ignorant is in their best interests.

The funny, inexplicable thing they don't address, is that if they really want to teach their children something other than what the public schools teach, they can do so, at home, after school, and on weekends, not to mention summers. If it's that important, why take a public school education away from them and foist on them your own made-up faux education? Supplement their education. Don't replace it. People have always done it that way. That's why churches have Sunday Schools, for christ's sake.

Their stated goals, and their means of achieving them, don't seem to match.

It's about the isolation, not the education. They want to shelter their children from the big bad world, which really isn't all that big or bad, unless you listen to your preachers and take them far too seriously .

Home schooling children is something that was commonly done prior to the government funded public education system. I just look at it like, if you are a parent and you think you could give your kids a much better education than the government can, and you happen to be willing and able to do so, then by all means go for it. I look at it like open source schooling, it may actually be the wave of the future too.

In addition, public education is really just a form of psychological abuse, it's essentially a cookie cutter lifestyle completely lacking in originality, everybody else does it too so who really cares that anybody did it in the first place. If people want to learn something or teach their children something then they should do their own research, their own investigating, draw their own conclusions, and ultimately open their own businesses too.

I think I can actually make a case for open source education and open source business models being the Libertarian wave of the future, everybody adds to society leaving their own unique marks, creating a powerful social and paradoxically individualist dynamic that is unfortunately lacking in our country due to everybody learning the same material and then competing against everybody else who holds the same general education. People needn't necessarily learn the same material and progress at the same rates of learning, IMO, that just seems so outdated, I think we should have more variety in this country instead of less. Even if a child is homeschooled by religious nuts, at least that kid has learned some bullshitting skills which is helpful later in life, hopefully, maybe the kid will learn to bullshit other religious kids into giving him or her money, or maybe will learn something that could potentially be useful in addition to the bullshit, like computer programming or something.

Is there a such thing as wrong material? What would constitute wrong material for somebody to study? Works of fiction and fantasy? Religions? Playing video games? Learning to play a musical instrument? Whatever kids want to do, let them, and then let them compete later in life, if they are unsatisfied with the results then they'll direct their own kids down a different more successful path perhaps.

Wrong material? Oh, how about that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, or that there's no evidence for evolution for starters. Those would be examples of factually wrong material. Other material on it's own might not be wrong, but could be made wrong by how it's presented, like teaching the Bible as being true, or perhaps some white supremacist propaganda.

As for the rest of what you said, it doesn't make any sense. They wouldn't have the education to understand why they were "unsatisfied with the results" and certainly wouldn't be capable of directing their own kids down a different path.

Sheltering never works, so whether their kids end up as religious clones like them is no guarantee, however depriving them of a proper education and raising them to be ignorant little shits pretty much guarantees a bleak future.

First, facts concerning the nation's founding or internationally recognized scientific theories are not "the government's version of truth". Second, there are educational standards in this country, as pathetically squalid as they are, and they have to met. The right to believe whatever you want is one thing, but preventing a child from getting the education they deserve and need is quite another. It's similar to the story of the Neumanns, where the parents chose prayer over medical help and their daughter died.

The issue is sheltering children from the outside world and anything which is contrary to religious beliefs. One's ability to teach then is irrelevant if they're actively encouraging ignorance.

Leaving the religious issue aside and simply addressing homeschooling in general, the number of people capable of providing a decent education to their children, due to personal ability, education, and simply having the time, is pathetically small. I think the fact that most of American households are two income households alone makes home schooling pretty impossible. Plus, as I said earlier, you're completely ignoring the other potential issues such as a child's learning disability or behavioral problems which only professionals are trained to identify and deal with properly.

(1) How do you think it's possible that only the religious parents have the capability to pull that off but that everybody else can not because they have to work 2 jobs? Am I missing something here? Are religious parents somehow able to cheat the system but everybody else is not?

(2) You think that only public school teachers can identify and deal with "properly" the problem of learning disabilities but their own parents are entirely incapable of dealing with that? Enlighten me on that one if you can…

(3) Making the assumption that all people who want to home school their kids choose to do so for religious reasons I think is a fallacy. Why take away the right of everybody to choose how to school their kids just because some people are going to abuse their kids? (actually, I view that as selective thinning of the herds if parents choose to raise their kids as vagabonds, then let them, at least those kids won't be in public schools dragging down the rest of the kids, imo, which you know they'd probably do anyway)

(1) Not all religious homeschool. Of the ones that do, they have a built in support network (ie – church community) which makes it easier so that you don't have to give up a job (although probably still tough to have a full-time one).

(2) They have training to identify such things, and professionals on the school district's payroll to refer them to for diagnosis for starters.

(3) Try actually reading what I write for once, because I didn't say all. As for the dumb kids dragging down the others in school, better for everyone that they're there because they'll be an even bigger drag on society later as uneducated, ignorant "vagabonds".

I must confess, I really have no idea what they teach in public schools, however I'm pretty sure it's probably all crap though given how stupid everybody else in America is…I know they probably learn to read, write, and do math, type on the computers, use the internet….very basic stuff imo, I think there is no reason why that needs to take 8 years to learn though, why aren't kids doing calculus and trigonometry by the time they are in 7th grade or so?

No, I mean, comparing my own bullshit education at a christian school, all I remember doing was singing and chapel services and playing sports, it wasn't even until 6th grade that we even took a logic class and started learning algebra and geometry. I don't even recall getting any science education until about 7th grade. Then when I got into high school, a public school, I remember everybody else being total idiots who were incapable of having any thoughts of their own. It's like I went to a retarded christian school and then transferred to a public high school and everybody else was even more retarded than I was taught to be.

I got kicked out of high school because I started experimenting with drugs and trying to seduce hot girls, it was a lot different than a Christian school, not better, just different. Then my whole life has just been fucked up and stuff. I went to a charter school to finish up and get my high school degree, and then went onto college (the charter school payed for a few semesters because I got straight A's there), I learned a ton of stuff at community colleges 2003-2005, but when transferring to ASU I eventually failed out of my aerospace engineering courses (because they were tough and I was religiously confused, plus I started taking Straterra when I probably shouldn't have been which was very bad for me)

Then I just went and got a full time job at Home Depot for a few couple years (I took the product knowledge for every department in the whole store even though I wasn't supposed to be doing that, I did so anyhow just because fuck the managers, right? I didn't want to continue being a bottom feeder for the rest of my life, I'm still paying off my student loans at ASU)

I ended up getting (wrongfully) fired from Home Depot because I was "harassing" one of the girls who worked there. I made one inappropriate joke, okay, dammit that was no reason to fire me, I was actually the most helpful person at Home Depot, I liked that job because it was helping people on their projects and stuff. I chose not to get a lawyer and get that shit off my record, instead decided to go to a 2 year school and I aced all my courses for water treatment and water hydrology to become a technician, now I'm just passively looking for an internship.

I've been doing a lot of research on my own reading physics books and all sorts of technical books and such, certainly enjoying running my blog while deconstructing all sorts of misinformation and such, I've been living with my parents helping my dad renovate houses and doing a lot of landscaping in the mean time.

I don't know, I feel kind of fucked by my life, I'm trying to make the most of it of course, I've definitely figured out how I'm going to invest my money once I start working in either hydrology or water treatment of which I'm currently certified for and assuming the jackasses can overlook my historic work performance (I'd been working minimum wage jobs off and on throughout the years as well). I don't think that public schools do a very good job either, and I don't think that I am alone in my thinking like that, and certainly I think I could do a much better job running a business then some of the businesses that I've worked for over the years (one of the technical books I read through was "Product Design and Development" another was "Sensors and Controls" and "Electronics the Easy Way"). I have a few projects I'm working on, trying to invent something using programs such as Pspice and Google Sketchup which is quite basic.

PhillyChief, I'm not doing as well off as I should be doing for the amount of time I've spent trying to get ahead in my life. I feel I'm on the verge of making great things happen, yet the results aren't necessarily showing that what I've been doing is working. However, I know for a fact that I could have gotten a lot more done in those early years instead of singing and doing chapel shit, don't even talk to me about how public schools are better though, I don't care about better, I only think about best. I know there has got to be a best way of doing things in America and I don't think that the status quo is it, not by a longshot, there are far better ways to be getting things done than we currently have.

(1) They are tightwads, that's how they do it, tightwaddery is an invaluable skill to have.

(2,3) The dumb kids drag down the rest of the smarter kids, which is why I suspect the public school system progresses so slowly in teaching kids math. It's not like America is an isolated country, there are foreign competitors who have been stealing our top manufacturing jobs for years, those slow kids are actually really good factory workers and such. Not every kid is special, despite what our government would have you believe.

1) the laziness of the kids: I did not need the school system to tell me to go off and find other information to the point that I could argue with my history teacher…and win. Self-motivation, that's the ticket.

2) The parents that don't bother to supplement their children's education, but blame the teachers for their child's lack of discipline and respect.

I don't care what you went through in your life – your appeal to emotions and your opinion that no one has an original thought in a public school are cries for attention over the mistakes you made, not a reflection of how people truly are.